In this release two animation modes were added: color scrolling and mesh rotation. I also fixed a few small bugs and improved compatibility with the new Qt 4.4. After nearly five years of development it can be considered a stable and feature-rich version. This is also the last release in this stage; in the nearest future I'm not planning to add new features except small improvements and fixes.
This release adds only one, but very interesting feature: rendering the fractal surface as a 3D mesh, using the OpenGL library for hardware-accelerated performance. It's possible to adjust the mesh resolution and various parameters of the view. The rendered image can also be saved or copied to clipboard.
Please test the 3D view and report any problems or suggestions. I will make one or two more releases of Fraqtive to close the first phase of the development roadmap by the end of May.
The second release in the 0.4 series adds some new features to Fraqtive, including: loading and saving bookmarks and color presets (including some predefined presets), working in full screen mode and copying and saving fractal images in various formats.
The crash occurring when quickly zooming in on multi-core processors, reported by a few users, was fixed. Note that there is still some rare problem in that situation (the fractal loses its position), I will try to fix it for the next release.
I also fixed compilation with MinGW and, thanks to the excellent collaboration with Patrick Matthäi, the Debian packager, problems with compilation using gcc 4.3 and building for MIPS and ARM platforms were solved. By the way - I'm looking for packages for other distributions. I'm trying to add what I can find to the downloads page, but it would help me a lot if you send me some links.
As I promised, a new version of Fraqtive is available. It has a completely new generator engine with support for SSE2, multi-core processors, different variants of fractals and many optimizations for almost real-time user experience. Also the user interface has been completely redesigned and rewritten using Qt4 to make Fraqtive available for both Linux and Windows platforms.
Note that this is still a beta version. Please test it and report any problems to the forums. The program is under active development, new releases will be coming soon. For now only the basic features are implemented, but it is already functional - take a look at the Fractal Gallery for some samples of its capabilities. I hope you will have as much fun using it as I had writing it :). Enjoy!
Recently I've been thinking a little bit about giving Fraqtive some fresh look and feel. This morning a few cool ideas came to my mind and I wrote a little design document. I will probably change my mind a thousand times before I actually start developing anything, but to make a good start I created a short Roadmap.
The first idea is to allow opening any number of tabs instead of limiting to one 2D and one 3D tab. The second idea is to redesign the property panels, splitting the options in a more organized way and introducing presets for both location and "skin" (i.e. color gradient plus other color-related options). Improving the exporting of images and maybe even 3D meshes is also worth considering.
It basically means rewriting the entire UI completely and refactoring the fractal generator code, but that's OK because I hate the way they're written now. Besides, the application is almost dead and the upcoming release of KDE4 is a great opportunity to give it a new life.
